The Two Big Waves of Polyamory in the News this spring

I've gone way too long without posting! I will speed up Polyamory in the News again. For now, some catch-up.

●  The wave of poly-rights legislation in Pacific Northwest cities (see previous post) caught the attention of, among many others, the New York Times. Which thinks it sees a long-term trend brewing. In the Northwest, Polyamory Finds Something New: Legal Protection (Feb. 28)

From big cities like Seattle and Portland, Ore., to small ones like Astoria, Ore., proponents of “nontraditional” romantic relationships are making headway in getting legal recognition.

By Anna Griffin

Under President Trump’s leadership, the country as a whole is swinging to the right on social policy. But the Pacific Northwest, as usual, is swinging its own way.

A wave of recent local ordinances in large liberal bastions like Portland, Ore., but also smaller communities like Astoria, Ore., which has a population of 10,181, would confer the beginning of legal protections to polyamorous relationships. The goal, pushed by a group based in California, is to establish legally protected family structures for groups of adults who are romantically or otherwise tied together under one roof.

...National Democrats might be trying to move the political conversation away from divisive social policies that helped cost them the White House in 2024, but proponents of the polyamory changes say Mr. Trump and his supporters have forced them to act. Adding protections for “nontraditional” households is a response to efforts to roll back rights for groups that already enjoy legal protections.

...Conservative activists say officials in the Northwest are using the language of nondiscrimination to foster broader cultural changes that have already run afoul of U.S. law, such as polygamy. ... “It’s ultimately an effort to recognize polygamous marriages and to do that by saying it’s discriminatory not to,” said Roger Severino, a vice president at the conservative Heritage Foundation and the architect of many of the first Trump administration’s social policies when he headed civil rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.

...In Portland, city councilors are considering a similar change in city ordinances, which they packaged as part of a response to hundreds of measures being considered in more conservative states to roll back gay and transgender rights.

At a hearing last week, they heard from more than 40 people supporting the addition of broader nondiscrimination laws that would include nontraditional family structures, including several speakers in polyamorous relationships who said clearer legal protections would help them feel more open when going about the day to day business of looking for jobs, renting homes, signing their children up for school or just engaging in small talk.

Brett Chamberlin, executive director of OPEN, the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Nonmonogamy... cited cases of polyamorous people being denied promotions or fired from their jobs, being denied rental applications from housing providers or being refused a sexually transmitted infection test because they’re listed on paperwork as married.

...“Chosen families take a lot of different forms,” said Ms. [Jessa] Davis, executive director of the Seattle Coalition for Family and Relationship Equity, who is helping with the Olympia [WA] ordinance.  “Even polyamory isn’t just about having sex with multiple people. It’s about what your community looks like.”...

Seattle's NPR station KUOW interviewed the article's author: Polyamorous people want to be Seattle's newest protected class (March 11).

As of May 31 the measures have passed in most of the cities named. But Seattle's City Council has still delayed introducing the legislation. Some advocates of the Seattle measure say councilors are wary of possible political backlash.

●  Almost two months after that Times story, The Guardian followed on at length: Polyamorous Americans are celebrating new laws establishing their ‘inherent worth and dignity’  (The Guardian, May 3)

 AzmanL / Getty

By Jake Thomas

Amy Nash-Kille knows that not everyone would choose a polyamorous family like hers. But she called it the “greatest blessing” of her life.

Nash-Kille said she has spent the last 17 years in a committed relationship with “two gentle, loving men”, sharing the costs and responsibilities of raising four kids.

But she’s concealed her family arrangement from her graduate school adviser, co-workers and even her hairdresser. She said someone harassed her family for more than a year, and she took out a restraining order to stop it before moving her family from a Colorado suburb to Portland, Oregon, in 2011.

In March, the city became the largest in the US to pass an ordinance protecting polyamorous people and multipartnered households from discrimination in housing, jobs and public accommodation. For Nash-Kille and her partners, it was “one of the greatest relief moments of our lives”.

...The new law, she said over email, “is helping to establish the inherent worth and dignity of people who have unusual family configurations when considered by society at large”.

Portland’s ordinance is the latest in a recent wave of cities including West Hollywood and Olympia, Washington’s capital city, extending civil rights protections to those in nontraditional family or romantic arrangements. Eight cities across Massachusetts and the west coast now have some form of legal recognition of polyamorous relationships.

Taken together, the efforts signal the emergence of a stigmatized group as a political constituency, as well as a challenge to the legal dominance of the traditional nuclear family – which has become the exception rather than the rule.

...“I’d like to get the government out of the business of evaluating our personal relationships,” said Diana Adams, an attorney who heads the Chosen Family Law Center and helped write ordinances in Massachusetts.

Adams said their bigger goal isn’t marriage for polyamorous people, but “unbundling” rights and benefits tied up in institutions that favor people in traditional relationships, including taxes, health insurance benefits and hospital visitation.

Brett Chamberlin – the executive director of the Oakland-based Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy (Open), which has campaigned for the ordinances – said polyamorous people are moving from being viewed as a “lifestyle oddity” to organizing into a movement.

Efforts are already under way for more ordinances in Pacific north-west cities such as Seattle, Eugene and Astoria, as well as Hazel Park, a small city near Detroit. Chamberlin hopes this will eventually create a tipping point where states and the federal government adopt protections for polyamorous people.

A more visible population

...Greater visibility hasn’t always come with greater acceptance. Open’s 2024 survey of nonmonogamous individuals found that 60% had experienced stigma or discrimination when dealing with healthcare, child custody or acceptance from their own families.

...After Portland’s ordinance passed, Skylar Cruz recalled her group chats lighting up with supportive messages. Cruz, a 33-year-old transgender programmer, said she has been in a polyamorous relationship for about a year after she and her male partner of six years added a trans woman to their relationship.

Skylar Cruz between her partners, Jordan Lewis and Robin
Bogushevich, in Times Square, New York. Courtesy Skylar Cruz

...“I feel like we’re at a crossroads in a lot of our political values here in the US,” she said. “And we ultimately have to decide whether or not people are worth protecting for being different. As somebody who is very different, I can’t opt out of being different at this point.”

...Despite the recent momentum for protecting polyamorous people, advocates say there are hurdles ahead. For instance, Seattle’s city council has yet to officially introduce the ordinance that local advocates have lobbied for. ... Davis said councilors in larger cities have privately expressed concern that adding polyamory protections to their municipal code could draw the ire of the Trump administration. ...

...For now, Cruz said, she was considering what the future holds after securing legal protections for her relationship, which she hopes lasts the rest of her life.

“I’ve got probably 50, 60 years left,” she said. “And in that time, I want to ensure that not only are we not being discriminated against, but that we are moving towards being seen as more ordinary, more common, more accepted.”

●  The religious right is taking alarmed notice.  Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the “reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.” (Time once called him), has a huge following – partly because he has earned a reputation as a genuinely thoughtful and kindly man.

Mohler has been distressed by the rise of polyamory since at least 2009. After the New York Times story, he called on red-state legislators to urgently pass laws banning their "blue dot" cities from protecting us from fear of being driven out of our jobs and homes: A Page Out of the LGBTQ Playbook: Liberal Activist for Polyamory Reveals Gameplan – This Should Be a Wakeup Call for State Legislatures (March 12).

This from a kindly and thoughtful man – in his own closed world.  Said Voltaire, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

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●  But the biggest polyamory-in-the-news event of the last two months has been something else: comedian Lindy West's memoir Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane. And the flood of contrasting media reactions to it, and the reactions to the reactions. The tl;dr: Some feminists called her a sellout. Others defended her choosing the life she wants. The right pounced. The mainstream clucked. 

West was already famous as a brash voice of millennial feminism and fat pride. Adult Braces tells how a case of Poly Under Duress, pushed on her by her spouse, morphed into her more than four great years now in a happy triad. The book is her story of that transformation, centered on a fraught road trip thrashing it out with her spouse  (who identifies as nonbinary and goes by either he/him or they/them), as they drove from Seattle to Florida. Hence the subtitle.

A New York Times headline sums it up: She Wrote a Book About Her Throuple. The Internet Lost Its Mind. (March 31)

By Elizabeth Spiers

...Lindy West has written a 336-page memoir, “Adult Braces,” that, among other things, describes her polyamorous marriage to her husband, Ahamefule Oluo, and their relationship with another woman, Roya Amirsoleymani. Ms. West is a feminist writer and comedian who first gained notoriety for her take-no-prisoners work at Jezebel over a decade ago. She is, therefore, something of an internet character, at least of a certain vintage, with a yearslong trail of writing and posting where she hashes out her ideas and gives readers a sense of who she is.

Sam Whitney/New York Times

Now much of the current-day internet has decided she either isn’t who they thought she was or is lying to herself in saying she’s happy in a throuple. The resulting discourse has ranged from concern that she was coerced into agreeing to nonmonogamy to accusations that she has betrayed feminism.

She wrote an earlier memoir, “Shrill,” which was turned into a TV show starring Aidy Bryant. Ms. West has written searingly about being a fat person in a fatphobic society, reproductive rights and her abortion, and refusing to define herself by how men see her. I picked up “Adult Braces” in part because she has written so well about these issues.

In a recent interview with The Times, Ms. West said she was at first devastated by her husband’s request to open things up. “Our initial conversation was a lot of me crying and being like, I don’t want anyone else,” she said. But after much soul searching and a road trip from Seattle to Florida, she accepted the situation and eventually formed her own relationship with her husband’s girlfriend.

Any discussion of polyamory reliably generates strong opinions. ...

Much of the reaction to Ms. West’s new book has been focused on adjudicating whether she can be truly happy in a throuple when nonmonogamy was her husband’s idea and whether her happiness is consistent with her feminism. Voices on the right claim she is a victim of millennial feminism run amok, and voices on the left claim her situation is a consequence of her feminism not going far enough. Both claims rely on a caricatured idea of what feminism is. 

...Actual feminism is not a neat list of dos and don’ts; it’s simply the idea that women deserve the same agency and rights as men. That includes the ability to decide whom they want to be with and how they choose to conduct their relationships. ...

There’s another element that makes this discourse catnip: She’s not performing marriage the way some would apparently like. People often bring insecurities about their own relationships — what would they do if their partner wanted a third? — to their evaluations....

...Ms. West insists she’s happy. Many of her readers insist she isn’t. But there is no one way to be happy, just as there’s no one way to be a feminist or to conduct a marriage. ...

●  There's been so much media about this that I won't even begin to list it! Here's the lengthy list from Google News (very incomplete) as of the time you read this.  

●  West gives the details of how it began in a podcast with the New York Times' "Modern Love" columnist, Anna Martin: Lindy West Thought She Couldn’t Handle Polyamory. She Was Wrong (March 4). The tl;dr: She and the other woman fell crazy in love, and it has lasted.

Lindy West

...West: It becomes clear that the next thing we need to do is hop on a call and discuss what the heck is going on. Aham [her spouse] and Roya [his new interest] video-called me. There was definitely incredible tension in the air. I think all of us were like: “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” And also I don’t want to make it sound easy, because also there’s still the part of me that’s terrified. And so it’s like, inside me are two wolves; one is having the time of her life and is so electrified by this. And the other one is definitely terrified. ... And I’m using my new skills to stay in the moment with what’s actually happening in front of me, which is that I’m feeling really connected with this person, who’s beautiful and sweet and kind and funny and smart, and who loves Aham, and I love Aham. It was a very complicated video call.

Martin: And let’s just say there’s nothing more electric than finding out someone has a crush on you. How did that make you feel?

West: It was very powerful. I was immediately like, “Oh, I like her a lot more all of a sudden.” She had just been this big cloud of mystery and suspicion, and I was like, “How do I know that she’s not trying to get rid of me so that you guys can be together?” And she’s not out there thinking the vile stuff that is happening in my head. She’s out there thinking: “Oh, Lindy’s beautiful. And she seems so smart and interesting. I would love to get to know Lindy.”

And I am processing my changing feelings about Roya while I’m on the road trip. And I think I started to feel so soothed by that feeling of safety. I liked the feeling of not having a stab of panic when Aham brought up Roya’s name. And all of a sudden I wasn’t having that anymore. And I was like: “What is this new place? I want to stay here.”

Martin: The circumstances of Aham and Roya’s relationship haven’t changed. If anything, they’ve intensified, right? So the safety you feel, that’s you. You’ve created that safety, no?

West: Yes. Absolutely. And that’s why it was different, I think. So the trip continues, and I’m talking to Aham more and more about Roya. And I believe Aham sent me a sexy underwear pic of Roya with her consent. And I was like, “OK, you can tell her that that’s a beautiful photo.” I’m such a dork.

...I suggested, “Why doesn’t Roya come up to Seattle, and we’ll see what happens?” I went by myself to pick her up. And she was instantly captivating. Like she was just so pretty and so sunny and smiley. And then we went to the show, and Roya and I held hands. Then we went to a bar, and Roya and I were sitting next to each other talking, and some drunk guy came up and grabbed her arm. And I was like, “I’m going to [expletive] kill that guy.” And I kind of bodied him away from us. The feeling I had was like: “That’s my girlfriend. Why would you think you can just touch her?” And then we went to the hotel, and we [all three] had sex, and it was really fun.

...Martin: In 2022, you, Aham and Roya announce what’s happening in your relationship. Can you tell me about that?

West: We were a romantic triad. We didn’t really know how to launch. Because it felt intrusive and stressful, and I felt resentful about it. Like why do I have to explain my life to people? But it really was eye-opening to me how angry people are about non-monogamy. And I think it’s because everyone thinks that if it becomes normalized, then their husband is going to say, “Now I need to have a girlfriend.” And I just want to say that you don’t have to do that. I wasn’t looking for it, but it found me. And I too had that fear, and it came true, except what I found on the other side was a way better life than before for me.

Martin: Why? How?

West: I just feel so much more freedom for myself. I have two people who love me instead of one. And it’s really just three people that live in a house instead of two. And we all help with the dishes.

Martin: That sounds kind of nice.

West: Yes. So we’re all three together, still. We’re into year five.

●  The kerfuffle has spread worldwide. Just one example, a friendly one in Ukraine: A Prominent Feminist Opens Up About Polyamory and How It Transformed Her Marriage (112.ua, a news site promising "independence, impartiality, and only verified information," May 19).

Translated from Відома феміністка випустила мемуари про поліаморію: як це змінило її шлюб, which talks about polyamoriyu without explanation as if readers already know what it is:      

By Shostal, Oleksandr

According to Vox - Feminist writer and activist Lindy West has released her fourth book, 'Adult Braces,' a memoir detailing her journey into an open marriage and her experiences with polyamory. The book has sparked lively debates online, particularly around themes of honesty in relationships and the evolving dynamics of marriage.

Polyamory Within Marriage

In 'Adult Braces,' West recounts how she and her spouse, Aham—a nonbinary individual who uses he/him and they/them pronouns—navigated the shift toward polyamory. The memoir also explores her relationship with a third partner named Roya, who moved in with West and Aham. This new relationship structure challenges conventional ideas about marriage and partnership.

The book has received mixed reactions on social media, where readers are actively discussing the issues West raises. ... West also emphasizes that 'she has autonomy, and it’s her choice.' These statements highlight the importance of personal agency in relationships—a central theme of the book.

Ultimately, 'Adult Braces' offers more than just a personal narrative; it contributes to broader conversations about relationships, marriage, and polyamory, drawing attention from a wide audience.

This memoir marks a significant step in expanding understanding and acceptance of diverse relationship models, as polyamory becomes an increasingly common topic of public discussion. It raises questions about traditional views of family and partnership, encouraging readers to rethink their own perspectives on love and commitment. The relevance of the issues explored in 'Adult Braces' reflects a growing need for new approaches and openness to experimentation in emotional connections.

More catching up on the news coming soon. 

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Speaking of Ukraine...  as I said in the deep dark cold of their recent winter with bombed power plants, these people don't give up. Now the changing tide of the war shows that, if you don't give up, fortune sometimes swings your way.

And if you still don't get what this war means to our own future... you need the long view.

BTW, the Telegram logo of PolyamoryUkraine:

 

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And another city! Berkeley just banned discrimination for "family or relationship structure"

Berkeley City Hall (City of Berkeley photo)

Last night Berkeley, California, prohibited  landlords,  schools, businesses serving the public, city officials, or "any person or agent or employee thereof" from discriminating "against an individual on the basis of that individual’s family or relationship structure."

The Berkeley law applies to, and defines, four areas for this protection: housing, educational institutions, city and city-supported facilities and services, and use of business establishments. It also specifies some exceptions. Here is the law's full text (starts on page 6).

For decades this kind of discrimination has plagued people in polyamorous relationships, costing them their homes, jobs, and other things as found in surveys of the poly community. Two-thirds of polyamorous people say they have experienced discrimination because of their relationships.

Berkeley joins neighboring Oakland as well as Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in enacting similar measures in the last 14 months. 

The Berkeley group PolyActive had tried to pass something like this starting seven years ago. City Council member Terry Taplin, the bill's author, said PolyActive "played a pivotal role in the advocacy for the initial 2017 bill and continued to support the current efforts. Their local insight and community mobilization efforts underscored the immediate need for legal protections within Berkeley."

Members of PolyActive on July 15, 2023, OPEN's first international Day of Visibility

But the big credit goes to the legal and policy whizzes at the national Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition (PLAC), who crafted the law. In addition, the international Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy OPEN) helped PolyActive mobilize the local community. The groups worked proactively with the Berkeley City Attorney's office to ensure that there were no legal glitches in the legislation. The City Council approved the bill unanimously on "first reading" May 7th, then again on "second reading" May 21st, thereby enacting it into law.

In December 2017 PolyActive got a similar measure past first reading in Berkeley — it would have been the first in the country — but that one didn't make it to second reading. This time, with experience and PLAC's expert legal work, the ducks were in a row.

Where will be next? Contact PLAC if you'd like to try to get this measure or something like it passed in your city or town.

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As it happens, Sparkle Moose and I attended a reception put on by PLAC at the Harvard Law School last Saturday evening. The six PLAC principals were just off their second annual high-intensity, in-person planning retreat, hosted by Harvard Law's LGBTQ+ Legal Advocacy Clinic. They were full of plans and ideas — for non-discrimination ordinances in more cities, involvement in other areas of the legal system, recruiting more lawyers and volunteers for various projects, building out their anemic social media presence and website, and hiring office staff. They are beating the bushes trying to fundraise for all this.

Five PLAC principals celebrating outside the Somerville, MA, City Council chamber
on March 23, 2023. From left: Kimberly Rhoten, Heath Schechinger, Alexander
Chen, Diana Adams, and Andy Izenson.  (Matthew J. Lee/ Boston Globe)

The larger picture here goes beyond polyamory and non-monogamy. The ordinances also protect traditional multigenerational families living under one roof, single-parent families, platonic co-op households of mutual support, and others. With housing in cities becoming ever pricier and in shorter supply, and with the isolated husband-wife-kids home becoming an ever smaller fraction of reality, alternatives must be allowed to grow. Polyfolks have kick-started these legal initiatives but will be a minority of those who benefit.

A new force in this direction will be the Modern Family Institute, a project of Heath Schechinger and others that seeks to raise $5 million for research and policy efforts over the next three years. It is explicitly about this larger picture:

MFI logo

Families and relationships come in all shapes and sizes.

But our society is not designed to support how people are structuring their families and relationships today. 

Our laws, built environment, and cultural norms were established to support a monogamous nuclear family structure that does not reflect the needs of families and relationships today. Families that don’t center two married adults often face significant infrastructural, legal, and financial hurdles, as well as stigma and discrimination.

The Modern Family Institute seeks to bring about a world where families and relationships are defined by their function, not their form. 

Our vision is to improve relational, mental, and physical wellbeing by ensuring everyone has access to resources and systems of care supporting their unique family and relationship structures. Our research drives systemic changes in legal, financial, housing, and social systems through supporting media representation, policy reform, and professional practices that help people build and sustain flourishing communities of care. 

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●  OPEN just put out a press release:

The good news just keeps coming! ...

Our gratitude to Berkeley Councilmember Terry Taplin, who sponsored the bill, and to our friends at the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, which drafted the ordinance. Coalition partners also included PolyActive... The Modern Family Institute, Chosen Family Law Center, Harvard Law School LGBTQ+ Legal Advocacy Clinic, and Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, and the many community members who added their voice.

...There can be no doubt that this is our moment, and that the future of this growing movement is bright.

But let's be clear: the population of these four cities represent a fraction of a percent of the total US population. The unfortunate fact is that most people are still not protected from stigma and discrimination on the basis of their non-monogamous identity or their family structure. There is much more work to do...

And we're here to do that work. OPEN is collaborating with coalition partners to develop new tools and resources to help community members like you bring these protections to your city or town. We're speaking with community leaders and elected officials in multiple cities to keep the momentum going. We're talking with the media to spotlight this issue and the growing power of our movement.  ...

And, they too need money.

●  The local Berkeleyside published a long article on the measure's passage, highlighting an eight-person co-op family that, with multiple incomes, can afford a house in the pricy Berkeley Hills neighborhood, ranked as one of the most desirable locales in the state: Berkeley law extends legal protections to polyamorous people and non-nuclear families (May 22)

Housemates Steph Tranovich (left), Lily Lamboy, Alexei Savtchenko and Kmo Mogg
chat in their co-op kitchen before dinner. (Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight)

By Ally Markovich

...Dave Doleshal... began organizing conferences on polyamory in Berkeley at a time when it was less accepted than it is today. ... Being open about his polyamorous identity, he was often turned down by landlords. At conferences, he heard stories of people being evicted, fired or passed up for promotions at work based on their relationship structure. With other polyamorous people, he considered advocating for a law to protect their rights, but didn’t get far.

Over time, Doleshal has seen polyamory and other diverse relationships become more accepted in Berkeley. “People who were polyamorous a long time ago, just gradually have started talking about it and being more visible,” said Doleshal, who has lived in Berkeley since the 1990s. He said the ordinance was a major step forward, making other legal protections possible. ...

...The Berkeley law has limited purview. It doesn’t extend to other areas where polyamorous people face discrimination, including the workplace and courts, which would need to be addressed at the state or county level.

...Advocates behind the new law said they hope it starts conversations about the way that monogamy and the nuclear family structure are baked into the legal and social fabric, from healthcare benefits to hospital rules. Eventually, they aim to bring a nondiscrimination bill to the California state legislature.

●  Slate, in anticipation of the Berkeley law passing, published a look at the larger polylegal picture:  L G B T… P?  (May 6)

Polyamory is everywhere these days—except protected under the law. But some advocates have an idea about how to change that.

 Slate/ Tingey Injury Law Firm/Unsplash/ Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty

By Abigail Moss

In case you hadn’t noticed, polyamory is all the rage right now. ... And, lest you think all this hubbub is some ginned-up PR campaign, consider that 4 to 5 percent of people in the U.S. are in consensually nonmonogamous relationships (not always the same thing as polyamory, but pointing in a similar direction), which is comparable to the number that identify as LGBTQ+. Research from the Kinsey Institute shows that as many as 1 in 6 people are interested in exploring polyamory.

For polyamorous folks like myself (I’m in a throuple), there’s definitely a feeling that the tide is changing. ...

Yet, despite all this social progress, the law hasn’t been as quick to catch up with the rise of these kinds of “nontraditional” relationships. And that’s a big problem, because major, negative misconceptions persist among the non-poly public, most of them stemming from the reduction of these relationships to a sexual kink. This, in turn, leads to the belief, for example, that a polyamorous environment is not a safe one for a child, or that a poly relationship is not a serious or valid family structure. For those on the outside, polyamory can still seem like a wild and irresponsible lifestyle—and unfortunately, it’s people on the outside who are making laws and policy for the rest of us.

Indeed, legally, we polyamorous people find ourselves on very shaky ground. ... Depending on where they live, a polyamorous person could be evicted from their home or denied housing because of their relationship style—I know firsthand that private landlords may be less likely to want to rent to a throuple, for example, than a monogamous married couple because of false assumptions that a polyamorous group will be inherently unstable and unreliable. And a poly person could be fired or denied promotions at work due to bias against polyamory (whether that’s the stated reason or not) —without the company facing the same legal ramifications they likely would if they terminated someone’s employment on, say, the basis of sexuality.

Which raises an interesting question: Should polyamory be recognized as a sexuality under the law? And what might be gained, or lost, by such a recognition? There is a lot of debate in the polyamorous and LGBTQAI+ community as to whether poly should “count” in this way. But with so many poly folks believing that their polyamory is not something they chose, but rather an innate part of themselves, running a legal gauntlet on an everyday basis can feel exhausting and more than a little censorious. 

...Dr. Eli Sheff is a sociologist and expert witness on cases involving families who have unconventional setups, including polyamorous ones. She explains that while the legal changes happening at a local level are an important step in the right direction, there are limits to how much they’re impacting polyamorous people’s lives nationally:  “The changes in Somerville, for example, only apply to city employees. Somerville can’t legislate that a national corporation must recognize your polyamorous relationship. So poly people remain extremely vulnerable.... On the national level, it’s wholly inadequate.”

Andy Izenson knows firsthand how this feels. “It’s been an expensive year,” they say, referencing medical bills that they and their two partners have all had to deal with after suffering different illnesses. They faced limitations on how much they could claim from their insurance companies because they are not in a more traditional relationship. Izenson, the senior legal director at the Chosen Family Law Center, is an attorney and mediator specializing in representing queer families, including polyamorous ones, and transgender people. I asked how polyamorous people might begin to advocate for themselves. Izenson explains that often, dealing with situations in a personal, one-to-one way is best. “For example, if three parents need to be able to pick their kid up from school, going to the school, speaking to the principal, trying to work things out that way is sometimes the best. You have to think about what systems in society you really need to be interacting with.”

...[In states ] such as Florida and Alabama, polyamory is effectively criminalized through bigamy statutes. And considering cases of parents losing custody battles because of their polyamorous relationships, a person might rightly think very carefully before coming out to a school principal, boss, or co-worker.

This is a shame, because we really don’t have anything to hide. Dr. Heath Schechinger, co-founder of the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition... [asked] 175 people engaged in nonmonogamous relationships to list the benefits of their relationship structure. Responses included gaining a greater social and support network, fostering greater honesty in their relationships, and having greater autonomy and independence in their lives. Sex-related benefits ranked as only the eighth most-cited reason. Polyamorous people such as myself already know this—my partners and I argue over what to watch on Netflix and remind each other to feed our cats, just like any married couple. But while these misconceptions persist, they’re a major blocker to legal reform.

Schechinger says that although it may not be possible for everyone, visibility is a vital first step in improving rights for polyamorous people: “I think if you have the privilege of being able to come out as polyamorous, it’s important to consider doing so,” he says. “We are in an era where we’re on a precipice of significant change.”

...Schechinger feels that the dam is about to break. “We are putting together a packet that people can take to their city councilperson and advocate for similar policies to be taken up in their city,” he said. These materials will form a toolkit that will be available in the coming months, and have been created in collaboration with the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy, Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, Harvard Law LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, and the Chosen Family Law Center. The toolkit will include relevant research and educational information, case examples, legal insights, and advocacy strategies.

...“It’s comparable to where LGBTQ advocacy was in perhaps the early ’90s,” says Schechinger. And people are getting behind this advocacy in droves.

“One of the problems, one of the beautiful problems, that my colleagues and I have right now is that there are countless numbers of people reaching out and asking how they can get involved and asking how they can offer support. Up until now, a huge part of their lives and their identities was going unrecognized. Finally, now there’s hope for progress. It’s only a matter of time before we see this start to scale.” And after all, what is poly if not the belief that things like understanding and love are capable of growth?

●  Also in anticipation, Yahoo News 360 rounded up opinions pro and con: Should the law recognize polyamorous relationships? (last updated May 20)

(Cute graphic, but how does this thing work?)

By Mike Bebernes

People in polyamorous relationships could soon have new legal protections in the San Francisco Bay Area if a bill currently under consideration by the city council in Berkeley, Calif. is passed. ...

Why there’s debate

The words “family” or “partnership” can mean myriad things to people colloquially, but when it comes to the law, they have very specific definitions that typically only allow for two adults in a relationship.

Poly advocates argue that laws limiting a family or domestic partnership in this way leaves those outside that mold vulnerable to discrimination. Nearly everywhere in America right now, there's nothing to stop a polyamorous person from being fired, denied housing, or blocked from receiving certain benefits — like health care — because of their relationship structure. There are also examples of poly people missing out on inheritance or even losing custody of children.

...Though public perception of polyamory does appear to be shifting, that same YouGov poll found that a majority of people still believe polyamory is morally wrong and oppose legal recognition for poly relationships. Opponents frequently suggest that poly relationships are inherently unstable and may be especially turbulent for children in multi-partner households. Many also argue that recognition of polyamorous relationships in things like housing law would be merely the first step of a larger campaign to expand marriage beyond two-person couples.

Perspectives

The question of poly rights is too important to be ignored

“Limited definitions of family are all over the legal system. Laws for domestic violence, rent control, insurance, and … inheritance rely on narrow understandings of the term, which often prioritize biological and marital relationships, and relegate other kinds of relationships.”  — Michael Waters, The Atlantic

The law is built around harmful misconceptions about how poly relationships actually work

“For those on the outside, polyamory can still seem like a wild and irresponsible lifestyle—and unfortunately, it’s people on the outside who are making laws and policy for the rest of us.”  — Abigail Moss, Slate

Society doesn’t have to legitimize every relationship style people conjure up

“Polyamory’s proponents censure those who remain unconvinced that mainstreaming such sexual perversions serves the public interest. We must celebrate each and every sexual aberration green-lighted by the academy, but condemn and exclude any whom the gatekeepers declare persona non grata for their sins against wokeness.”  — Casey Chalk, American Conservative

Denying poly people rights isn’t going to make them go away

“I think it's just important for mainstream audiences to recognize that just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are people who are capable of having multiple romantic connections at the same time, and that is just a thing that is always going to exist, whether you like it or not.”  — Leanne Yau, polyamory educator, to USA Today

Polyamory poses a very real threat to traditional two-person relationships

“We are at risk — culturally and legally — of monogamy becoming a continuously negotiated agreement between partners rather than a universally understood axiom of marriage. When that happens, monogamy gets harder for everyone to ask for and expect; it gets easier to question and devalue. Marital monogamy will recede along with the benefits it offers families and society. That’s a price we don’t want to pay.”  — Alan Hawkins and Daniel Frost, Deseret News

All poly people want is to legitimize the commitments they’ve already made

“If people want to take legal responsibility for each other, that’s a good thing.”  — Alexander Chen, lecturer on LGBTQ+ civil rights at Harvard Law School, to Boston Globe

Without legal protections, polyamorous people have to hide who they really are

“This lack of social and legal acceptance has compelled many polyamorous people to hide their true identity from their coworkers, family, and even closest friends. The danger of living openly means that … polyamory hasn’t found a foothold in mainstream culture, which in turn has created a cascade of confusion about it that needs to be corrected.”  — Caroline Rose Giuliani, Vanity Fair

Poly relationships are fundamentally unstable

“Jealousy is not an emotion invented by men in the 1950s or 1800s to control women. Both men and women are jealous creatures, especially about romantic partners, and we have been since the beginning of recorded history. … This is why every polyamorous community throughout history … has failed. Polyamory just doesn’t work.” — Conn Carroll, Washington Examiner

●  Canada's national CBC News reports, Polyamorous relationships are on the rise in Canada. The law is still catching up (May 8).

"...In 2018, three unmarried adults in Newfoundland and Labrador were declared the legal parents of a child born within their polyamorous family — a legal first in Canada, CBC News reported. Then in 2021, a B.C. Supreme Court judge ordered that all three members of a polyamorous triad should be registered as parents of the boy they were raising together as a family.

"Put bluntly, the legislature did not contemplate polyamorous families [in designing current law]," Justice Sandra Wilkinson said in the decision. ..."

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Are poly people annoying? Also, Oakland's new relationship non-discrimination law. A spate of open-marriage discovery books. And more.

First off: The big poly/ ENM/ alt-family news of the month (see last week's Another city! Oakland passes nondiscrimination law) finally got some mainstream media coverage. From KQED in San Francisco: Bay Area Cities Push to Legally Validate Polyamorous Families (April 25). Note the "cities" plural.

And yes, life- and career-disrupting discrimination against us in housing and employment is a real and common problem. 

"John Owens poses for a photo with his partners Emily Savage (left)
and Alejandra Bravo Ducey at a celebration party at the East Bay
Community Space in Oakland on April 16, after a bill prohibiting
discrimination of nonmonogamous families passed in the
Oakland City Council." (BethLaBerge/KQED)

 

By Lesley McClurg

John Owens pulled his brown shoulder-length hair back into a bun and tossed brightly colored T-shirts and books into crates and boxes. The 37-year-old artist and writer is moving for the fifth time in less than a decade. ...

Six months after moving into the duplex tucked off the 580 freeway in Oakland, the dishwasher, garbage disposal and driveway gate all needed repairs. Owens told his landlords that one of his romantic partners would be visiting the house and could meet the repair person. This was the first time he’d shared details about his love life. After that, Owens said, the interactions between the landlords “felt much stranger,” and it grew more awkward as time passed.

“The landlords are pretty judgy about polyamory,” Owens said. “At one point, they tried to ask us to leave, threatening an owner-occupied eviction thing. Then, they backtracked and said we could stay, but with a 10% rent increase.”

He said his polyamorous lifestyle alarmed the landlord or master tenant in his last four living situations. 

...“That type of discrimination is pretty common,” Owens said. “It’s hard to even think about all the different times, different people that I’ve encountered in professional, medical, housing or institutional settings that have made it pretty clear that they’re not OK with the way I live my life.”

Research shows that two-thirds of people engaged in consensual nonmonogamy report feeling stigmatized, which inspires many people to hide that they are polyamorous because they fear negative perceptions.

“Stigma and discrimination can show up in a range of domains: housing, employment, health care and immigration,” said Brett Chamberlin, founder and executive director of the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy [link], a nonprofit advocacy group. “Courts have revoked custody from parents who have multiple partners.”

This month, the Oakland City Council passed new legislation formally recognizing polyamorous families, the first of its kind on the West Coast. It protects “diverse family structures” from discrimination in housing and at businesses and introduces a civil financial penalty for any rights violations by city services or facilities.

...“There’s not a lot of really wonderful good news in the world,” Owens said. “And this is a really wonderful and unambiguously good thing that Oakland is doing.”

Berkeley lawmakers plan to vote on the same legislation on May 7.

A growing movement

Somerville and Cambridge in Massachusetts passed the first laws granting rights to nontraditional families.

“This is a really exciting moment for the nonmonogamy movement because it helps validate and protect families and relationships that for a long time have existed in the shadows or at the margins of societies,” Chamberlin said.

“The nonmonogamous community has something really important to offer this world,” he said. “The way that we pursue relationships is an expression of our values. We put connection above consumption, and we put community and cooperation above competition.”

...Owens said the traditional model didn’t work for him. He had a daughter in his early 20s when he was living in Durham, North Carolina.

“It was hard,” he said. “I can’t imagine trying to parent in a one or two-parent household ever again. There’s no way. For the long arc of human history, children have been raised by the village in large groups of people. My dream scenario is some big polyamorous collective.”

---------------------------------------

●  Some people support polyamory in principle but find themselves annoyed by us in practice. Here's one of them. She's witty.  

The Yale Review (it originated in 1819) says it "aims to discover a new generation of writers and thinkers." It says "Brandy Jenson lives in New Orleans with her two dogs" and does an occasional advice column called "Ask a Fuck Up." The magazine published her meditation The Polycrisis: Why can’t we stop talking about nonmonogamy? (April 24).

Excerpts below. How many of her impressions sound plausible to you? Why?

"Polyamory sometimes seems like a practice made to generate
conversations, writes Brandy Jensen." (Getty Images)

TOO OFTEN THESE DAYS I find myself in the position of defending someone I think is annoying from someone I know is dangerous. Most recently this happened with polyamorous people, the existence and behaviors of whom many readers claim to be tired of talking about, only to gleefully comb through every new book or magazine profile. ... I’m guilty of participating in the endless chatter: these too-deep dives are very easy to make fun of. Plus I’m not straight and live in New Orleans, and you can only go on so many dates with people who say things like, “I separated from my nesting partner to go solo poly, although lately I’ve been thinking I’m actually more of a relationship anarchist,” before you build up sufficient resentment to want to get a few jokes in.

This isn’t the fault of the polyamory community as a whole. It’s easy to have your scene ruined by annoying rich people (for example, San Francisco) or to make something cool sound uncool by talking about it too much (for example, weed) or to be right and yet still be embarrassing about it (for example, atheism). The lighthearted mockery of terms like “compersion” is mostly a harmless good time, until it inevitably provides cover for reactionary sexual politics. Suddenly someone is writing an essay in The Atlantic about how polyamory is bourgeois, and before I can even think “That doesn’t seem right,” a bunch of revanchist weirdos eager to roll back the Sexual Revolution are chiming in on X to call polyamory both bourgeois and morally degenerate, and all the fun has been sucked out of my eye-rolling. And so I end up back in bed with the polyamorists, wishing they could figure out how to make having sex sound sexier.

-------------------------------------

THE FIRST TIME I slept with a couple it felt like it happened by accident. I don’t mean that it was farcical, but simply that there wasn’t any planning beforehand. Had they told me in advance that they were interested in sleeping together, I probably would have laughed. As I remember it, we were in a big room full of people at a party, and then somehow we were in a bathroom doing drugs, and then somehow we were in a bed doing things I’d never done before. ... 

A classic critique of polyamorists: these people appear to like talking about sex more than they like having it. Perhaps that’s unfair, but polyamory sometimes seems to me like a practice made to generate conversations. Conversations between partners about the possibility of new lovers and between new lovers about prior partners, meta-conversations about how well or poorly all these conversations are going—and, of course, conversations between people who aren’t in any way involved.

-------------------------------------

There’s no getting around how important communication is to the polyamorous lifestyle. They are always communicating. This ardor for talking may be, in part, what inspires so much chatter among outside observers. ... Monogamous marriages are famously inscrutable to outsiders — you never know what really happens behind closed doors. [But when they're poly] how thrilling to feel that one’s nosiness is justified. Don’t you think this is a sign they’re going to break up? Is she really okay with it, or is she just doing it to make him happy? Do they think we’re prudes now? Can you believe they think they’re better than us?

-------------------------------------

And then there is the content of the communication between polyamorous people about the practice itself, which can come off as smug. In January’s New York feature, a member of a polycule named Nick described his relationship like this: “Some people like to run marathons. We like to do polyamory, complex relationship stuff. Sarah’s favorite activity for the two of us to do is couples therapy.” A member of the Boston polycule featured in The New York Times had this to say: “We learned a strategy from the Multiamory podcast called ‘agile scrum,’ which was adapted from business-meeting models. We utilized that format. We did that for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing. That gave us great communication tactics.” I have no interest in going to grad school for relationships, especially when the other students sound so keen to be best in class. 

-------------------------------------

THIS KEENNESS TO STUDY, and schedule, and have discussion groups, goes some way to explaining the moniker sex nerds, which my friends and I began using a few years ago to express our benign derision, and a long way to explaining the temptation to bully them. Nerds have spent the past few decades triumphing in almost every aspect of American popular culture, and it’s impossible to make them feel bad about it. ... But the classic tactic of saying they are doing sex in a weird way remains available—especially when they’re so eager to tell you about how they play Catan with their polycule every Wednesday.

Polyamory, in this country at least, has pretty much always been the domain of nerds, as... Christopher Gleason’s [recent book] American Poly: A History, makes clear. ... All of these earnest weirdos thought they could remake the world, and insofar as they succeeded, the results have been unevenly distributed.

 ... Liberationists and free lovers had hoped that remaking sex might remake the world, but the relationship between sex and other terrains of political struggle has turned out to be far more complicated. ... Nonmonogamy does not automatically bring about the structural changes which might materially improve intimate life for everyone, As it becomes increasingly popular, [historian Florence] Sutcliffe-Braithwaite cautions, it may also become more easily “sublimated into simple lifestyle politics.” It can therefore be maddening when some polyamorists insist that a day job making surveillance technology does not preclude them from considering themselves politically radical, as long as they spend their weekends having orgies.

...Some threshold number of polycules will never bring down a government.... If what one wants is revolution, of course it isn’t enough to be a revolutionary of sex—but neither does that mean that we shouldn’t be. The answer to any critique which distinguishes between sexual and material freedom must be to claim both. In a system that seeks to atomize and isolate, there is still some emancipatory potential in exploring different styles of living. ...

●  On the subject of self-focused, unrevolutionary revolution — Molly Roden Winter found herself the poster gal for this when her open-marriage memoir More, set in Brooklyn's tony Park Slope, came out with a publicity bonanza starting in January. She adjusts with an interview in the Guardian/Observer. It's titled ‘I wanted sexual adventures, I didn’t want to fall in love’: Molly Roden Winter on her astonishing memoir of an open marriage (April 21).

Vincent Tullo/The Observer

By Michael Segalov

More documents Roden Winter’s life from 2008 to 2018. “I’ve done a lot of living since then,” she says, “a lot of thinking and experiencing. How we do polyamory today is hugely different to what’s at the heart of the book.” Her marriage has evolved, as has the wider conversation about ethical non-monogamy. At present, the couple are properly poly. “My husband and I both love multiple people,” she says, “and it makes us love each other more, not less.” She has two additional partners: one relationship has been ongoing for three years, the other for two. ...

“One response” from critics, she says, “has been to tell me how my husband manipulated me into having an open marriage. That I’m a victim of the patriarchy with no agency.” Certainly, he encouraged the idea – Roden Winter being with other men was a turn on for him. “At first, the only way I could give myself permission was by telling myself that Stew wanted me to have sex with someone else. I was still trying to please him.” But therapy reshaped her rationalisation. “Women of my generation were taught to be pleasers. That being a good mother is to take burnt toast and scraps. In time, I realised I was craving something of my own, that didn’t belong to the marriage.”

Needless to say, there have been snipes and revulsion aplenty from conservatives. “Their view is that I’m a pervert and, with kids involved, what we’re doing is immoral. Meanwhile, they’re 19 and 22 and completely flourishing. It’s why I felt in a good position to write the book.”

...Roden Winter feels the book has proved both popular and divisive not because of its content, but who its author is, and what she represents. For generations, queer people – and gay men in particular – have operated outside the marriage, children, monogamy trifecta. ... “The idea it’s an American heterosexual woman, with children, talking so openly? A heteronormative couple breaking the rules and being honest about it?” This, Roden Winter believes, is what’s causing a stir.

“It shows that people like me could be anywhere. I have a husband, house and kids. I dress, act and live like a Park Slope mom. It throws people off kilter to imagine they, too, could live like me. That I have children, who aren’t fucked up and I’m not being manipulated or miserable.”

...And there have been plenty of positive responses to the book: young parents, mothers in particular, in newly opened marriages grateful for seeing their experiences and emotions acknowledged. ...“Where I live, people consider themselves super liberal. You’ll see in shop windows matching mother and daughter sized shirts emblazoned with ‘The future is female’. But the rules for how you’re supposed to behave as a mother are suffocating, I feel. We put mothers into these straitjacketed roles and shame them for not fitting. ... That’s why this book resonates.”

...Frankly, it all just sounds… exhausting? Not the sex, specifically. But managing multiple long-term romantic relationships. “Most worthwhile things are,” she replies. “We don’t say: medical school sounds so hard, just quit.”...

...Only one rule remains in place today. “If one of us has feelings about something the other is doing,” she says, “we have to work through it together. You can’t say ‘Don’t be jealous’ or ‘It’s ridiculous that you feel insecure’. You have to help the other person feel better.”...

Roden Winter does an interview on polycoach Kitty Chambliss' Loving Without Boundaries podcast just up (April 24; 49 minutes).

●  A 2024 flood. Following Roden Winter's More, Rachel Krantz's memoir Open being reissued, and Holly William's novel The Start of Something soon to appear, another woman's open-marriage-inspired book just came out: Open Season by Cassie Werber in the UK.

It's a novel. Werber writes about her own life in the Guardian: My husband is my co-parent, friend and lover – but he isn’t the only person I have sex with: the inside story of an open marriage (April 20)

By Cassie Werber

I settled back into the train seat and pulled a notebook out of my bag: something extraordinary had happened... the night I’d [just] spent near Brighton with a man I’d known for years, but seen again in a whole new context. About how delighted I felt, how hot, how incredibly free.

My body, which had been pregnant in the Covid pandemic, given birth and then dragged itself through several house moves with a baby and a three-year-old, seemed to be renewed, on fire. My mind was blown, and my lips were bruised. ... I texted friends, caught eyes with strangers: I wanted to talk to everyone about how I was feeling. Most of all, I wanted to tell my husband.

For plenty of people, the idea that I could be so excited about a new sexual encounter, and at the same time in a truly committed marriage, doesn’t compute. But that’s the experience I’ve had for the last eight years, during which I’ve been married to my life partner, had two children, pursued career goals – and also seen other people. It hasn’t all been easy but, honestly, it hasn’t been fraught. ... 

...So how did it happen? ...In the first year of our marriage, we started talking about going together [to a sex club]. We’d both assumed that that world, which we’d only brushed up against before, was probably closed to us now; we were excited to discover it wasn’t. This discussion was organic, gradual and mutual, segueing from the language of fantasy into one of more concrete, real-world plans. It wasn’t driven by one person, and no one had to do any convincing. We didn’t know what it would feel like to experiment with other people, whether it would be the right step for us. We didn’t know whether we’d feel jealous.

There are an infinite number of ways to be in an open relationship. ... David and I haven’t felt the need to lay down hard rules for our relationship. So far, at least, we seem to understand each other and communicate quite well. We set aside times for the discussion of worries and annoyances, and usually do so out of the house, while walking. We also talk to each other about the more intense feelings that do, sometimes, come up: rejection or hurt, longing or confusion. Our relationship isn’t some kind of ideal template. We argue as much as many couples. We just don’t often argue about this.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. When I stepped off the train after that incredible night away, I walked into several hard days. I found myself feeling really strong, but also spiky. The house was still a mess. Our son still didn’t like preschool. David wanted me to slot back into the exact groove I’d left. But I felt wild, in a good way, and didn’t want to fit back in. ...

●  People posts What Is a Throuple — and How to Know When the Relationship Type Is Right for You, According to an Expert (April 21). "Dr. Lori Beth Bisbey speaks with PEOPLE about [this] 'type of polyamory' and when it may be something to consider." She gives some good warnings for new folks. 

By Nicholas Rice

...Highlighting whether a throuple is right for certain individuals, Bisbey first warns, "Getting three people who align enough to live together with deep intimacy is not simple."

However, "If you are willing to live with two people and have the skills to work through the complexity, it might be a good choice," she adds. "One reason is that two incomes aren’t enough in a lot of places, so three people sharing works better."

(Getty stock photo)

...Bisbey tells PEOPLE signs that it might be the "right choice" include: "You didn’t mind sharing your toys (even your favorite ones) as a child, you desire high levels of communication and interaction with people, and you have found it difficult to be monogamous."

Other reasons that she considers non-monogamy may be of interest to people is if they "have lots of complicated desires and needs, really enjoy complexity in your life (but not drama) and have a high level of honesty with yourself and others and are willing to be authentic."

..."People often romanticize being part of a throuple, but it is actually quite complicated. It is easier to have multiple separate relationships where you are not all sharing space, finances, decisions about everything," she explains. "Throuples work together like couples, dividing labor between three instead of two. Consensus is harder because of more people. Higher levels of communication are needed and all relationships within the group need attention."

Speaking about the stigma surrounding throuples, and the reaction they may receive for their relationship type, Bisbey offers a few words of advice.

"Be prepared to educate people when needed, but remember not everyone is entitled to know your business.... Make sure you have thick skin. If you offend easily, do some personal work to increase your resistance to other people’s views of you. Keep your life private and only share what you are comfortable with anyone knowing."

"Finally, make friends with other non-monogamous people."

 -----------------------------------

● The New York Times Magazine story on the "20-person polycule" a couple weeks ago (parts of the polycule are actually rather loosely bonded) made waves closer to where the 20 live. The Boston Globe's site Boston.com followed up with What’s a polycule? What we learned from the NYT story on an unusual arrangement happening near Boston. (April 17)

By Abby Patkin

...According to The New York Times Magazine, the term “polycule” suggests “an intricate structure formed of people with overlapping deep attachments: romantic, sexual, sensual, platonic.” In other words, a sort of web of various relationships and personal connections.

One polycule member interviewed for the article said the Boston-area group includes about 20 people in their mid-20s to mid-40s, with gender identities and sexual orientation running the gamut. ... 

“It’s an evolving organism that looks entirely different from everyone’s perspective,” Ashley said. 

...“It’s loving people in a very unapologetic way, not conforming to norms,” polycule member Bine said, later adding, “As a woman, and as a queer woman, being able to live my life as authentically as possible without needing my husband’s permission, that’s empowering.” ...

...The bottom line: If you’re polyamorous and/or looking to join or form a polycule, the Greater Boston area isn’t a bad place to be. ...

Actually, many people around here find poly community hard to locate. But we're definitely not Topeka.

●  From Business Insider: Members of a 20-person polycule used a business strategy called 'agile scrum' to resolve their relationship issues. Here's how it works. (April 18, paywalled) 

By Julia Pugachevsky

...Agile scrum is a combination of business principles and strategy. The idea is for teams to break down their deliverables into smaller tasks and shorter timeframes, reviewing their progress as they go. That way they can swiftly adapt to changes to produce more effective results in the long run.

In The New York Times, Ann said the couple practiced agile scrum "for a year and a half, at least once a month, sometimes six to 10 hours of hard poly-processing."

...[She and her husband] said agile scrum — which they learned from the podcast, Multiamory — helped them to find themselves and each other within the polycule dynamic.

...In 2001, 17 software developers in Utah got together and wrote a manifesto on ways to improve their work. Agile is a set of principles that promotes collaboration and flexibility among teams to produce faster and more effective results. The values include "individuals and interactions over processes and tools," and "responding to change over following a plan."

Scrum is a concrete framework based on agile philosophy that involves smaller, cross-functional teams delivering products in short cycles, or "sprints." It's essentially a more structured approach to agile principles, allowing teams to frequently complete projects together and give each other feedback.

At some point, agile scrum crossed over into the realm of love. ...

●  PS: Poly and neurodiversity research. Comments I made about poly and neurodiversity caught the eye of Janet Walsh-Adams at Australia's Deakin University. She's a PhD candidate doing research at the university's Healthy Autistic Life Lab. She writes, 

Click image to enlarge,
click here for the survey.

I've been following your page for several years, and found it personally helpful as a polyamorous person in getting a nice overview of what was happening in the worldwide community.

You might be aware of some discourse in the online forums about how neurodivergent people (especially autistic and ADHD) seem to be more likely to be attracted to non-monogamy, but nobody has studied this empirically yet. I feel pretty fortunate to be the person who is undertaking the topic for my PhD, and hope to do the community justice in exploring whether there are specific motivations, experiences or supports relevant to different types of practitioners.

Whilst my lab focuses on autism, we're accounting for all neurotypes, and welcome self-identified participants, those with formal diagnoses, those who are non-autistic and those who are unsure. Participants just need to be 18+ and be proficient in English. They can come from any location, have any relationship preferences or experience, and identify with any gender or sexuality. 

Also, here's a story I published with some early speculation on the relationship between autism and non-monogamy.  

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile,

    

Aid for Ukraine finally made it through Congress — hopefully not too late to save a free and promising society, but already too late for many thousands of the pro-democracy resistance — after months of blockage by the pro-Putin half of the U.S. Republican Party. The List of Shame.

Here is why I've been ending posts to this polyamory news site with the Ukraine situation: I've seen many progressive movements die out over the years because they failed to scan the wider world accurately and understand their position in it strategically.

We polyamorous people are a small, weird minority of social-rule breakers. Increasingly powerful people call us a threat to society — because by living successfully outside of their worldview, we expose its incompleteness.

Our freedom to choose our relationship structures, and to speak up for ourselves about the truth of ourselves, is just one way we depend on a free and pluralistic society that respects people's dignity to create their own lives, to access facts, and to speak of what they know.

Such a society is possible only where people have reasonably good power to govern themselves, combined with legal structures that are at least supposed to guarantee the rights of all.

Innovative people, communities, and societies who create their own lives, and who insist on the democratic structures and legal rights that enable them to do so safely, infuriate and terrify the authoritarians who are growing in power around the world and in our own United States. Now with direct mutual support, which is increasingly unhidden.

Such rulers and would-be rulers seek to stamp out other people's freedom to choose their lives — by intimidation, repressive laws, inflammatory disinformation and public incitement, weaponizing police abuse, or eventually, artillery.

For what it's worth, Polyamory in the News received more pagereads from pre-invasion Ukraine over the years (56,400) than from any other country in eastern Europe.

You can donate to Ukraine relief through this list of vetted organizations (last updated Oct. 2023). We're giving to a big one, Razom, and to a little informal one, Pizza for Ukraine in Kharkiv, the project of an old friend of my wife.

But that is only the start. For those of us born since World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Because we have entered another time when calculating fascism, at home and abroad, is rising and sees freedom and liberalism and social tolerance as weak, degenerate, delusional — inviting easy pushovers. As Russia thought it saw in Ukraine. The whole world is watching what we will do about it.

Background: "The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think."  More: "If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster."

The coming times may require hard things of us. We don't get to choose the time and place in history we find ourselves born into. We do get to choose how we respond to it. 

Need a little help bucking up? Play this. Another version. More? Some people on the eastern fro nt trying to hold onto an open society. (TW: war is awful.) Maybe your granddad did this from a trench against Hitler's tanks— for you, and us, because a world fascist movement was successfully defeated that time, opening the way for the rest of the 20th century.

But the outcome didn't look good for a couple of years then, either. Popular history remembers the 1945 victory over the Nazis and the joyous homecoming. Less remembered are the defeats and grim prospects from 1941 through early 1943.

Remember, these people say they are doing it for us too. They are correct. The global struggle between a free, open future and a fearful revival of the dark past that's shaping up, including in our own country, is still in its early stages. It's likely to get worse before it gets better. The outcome is again uncertain, and it will determine the 21st century and the handling of all its other problems.

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PS: Ukraine should not be idealized as the paragon of an open democratic society. For instance, see If Ukraine Wants To Stand for Liberty and Democracy, It Should Rethink Some of Its Wartime Policies. And it has quite the history of being run by corrupt oligarchs — leading to the Maidan Uprising of 2013, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and Zelensky's overwhelming election in 2019 as the anti-corruption candidate. So they're working on that. And they're also stamping hard on the old culture of everyday, petty corruption.  More on that.  More; "Ukraine shows that real development happens when people believe they have an ownership stake in their own societies."

Now, writes US war correspondent George Packer in The Atlantic, 

Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society. What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.”

They have a word there, with a deep history, for the horizontal, self-organized, mutual get-it-done that grows from community social trust: hromada. Learn that word. It's been keeping them going  to the extent they've been able. We polyfolks often dream of creating something like that community spirit in miniature, in our polycules and networks. Occasionally we succeed.

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Social attitudes in Ukraine are mostly traditional, rooted in a thousand years of the Orthodox Church. But not bitterly so like often in the US; in the last generation the ideal of modern European civil society has become widely treasured, and social progressivism has room to thrive. The status of women has fast advanced, especially post-invasion. More than 43,000 women volunteer in the armed forces, flooding traditionally male bastions — including as combat officers, artillery gunners, tankers, battlefield medics, snipers, and infantry. (Intimidating video: "Thus the Witch has Said".) Ukraine has more women volunteering in combat positions than any other armed force in the world.

  
Some LGBT folx in the armed forces display symbols of LGBT pride on their uniforms, with official approval, whereas in Russia it's a prison-worthy crime for even a civilian to show a rainbow pin or "say gay." A report on Ukraine's LGBT+ and feminist acceptance revolutions. Another. Another. Another. War changes things.

And in December 2022, Russia made it a crime not just to speak for LGBT recognition in Russia or occupied Ukraine, but to speak for "non-traditional sexual relations." Belarus, a Russia subject state, has followed suit. Pre-invasion, Russia had a visible polyamory education and awareness movement.

Polyfolks are like one ten-thousandth of what's at stake globally. Ukraine must have our full material backing for as long as it takes them to win their security, freedom, and future. Continue to speak up for it.

                                     

A Russian writer grieves: "My country has fallen out of time."

Women defenders near the eastern front

PPS:  U.S. authori-tarians, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are saying that allowing women in front-line roles is a woke plot to weaken America's armed forces. Ukraine puts that shit to bed. Do you have a relative who talks like that? Send them this video link to Vidma, who commands a mortar platoon, recounting the story of one of their battles near Bakhmut.

Update April 22, 2024: A year and a half later Vidma is still alive, still with her mortar unit in the Bakhmut region, and posting TikToks. They are now at the front in, it looks like, the battle shaping up for Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop town west of Bakhmut that will soon, unfortunately, be in world news. A young girl who looks high-school age has showed up to join them. Another. Their lives, and their promising society, depend on us. 

And maybe our own? Says Maine's independent Senator Angus King (Jan. 31, 2024),

Whenever people write to my office [asking why we are supporting Ukraine,] I answer, 'Google Sudetenland, 1938.' We could have stopped a murderous dictator who was bent on geographic expansion…at a relatively low cost. The result of not doing so was 55 million deaths.

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